Diamond Tears

Flying into Texas I couldn’t tell whether the big patches of buildings were prisons or apartment complexes. The airport was full of cowboys and Mexicans. I like going places and not being surprised at all.

In Arkansas my dad tells me about his work. One of his coworkers’ fathers just shot someone nine times in a road rage incident. One of his coworkers’ daughters just shot someone in a fight. I can nearly forgive the homicide because people here are so damn friendly.

My sister wants him to move to the U.K. because the company he works for also has facilities there. She says if he did his coworkers there would love these stories. I reply yeah, it’s great they can laugh at the suffering of poor southern people. They talk about road rage and how people here are “just angry”. They seem to think of their constant anger as an inherent condition rather than a result of poverty.

We went to a smoke shop that advertised CBD, but when we ask, the cashier shakes his head and says Arkansas banned CBD three months ago. He tells us about how much money the business has lost and says angrily - “Our governor does not care about us.”

I sobbed on the bathroom floor of a cafe then went digging for diamonds in a volcanic crater and found absolutely nothing. Outside that cafe I saw a man with a swastika tattoo on his neck.

They had big basins of water you could use to sift through your mud to find anything special. There I overhead an old man telling two other men that his pregnant daughter was killed in a head on collision with her husband. The two men offered sincere condolences but didn’t seem shocked. The old man responded it was part of God’s plan. When you have no hope you turn to fatalism. The two men later offered me gloves and an apron to use and we chatted a bit.

The people here are great at chatting. I think about Vienna and Switzerland and the quality of life there, but people don’t really do small talk or chat with strangers. Down here the government and systems fail you and therefore it’s more important to cultivate a sense of trust and familiarity with the people around you. What else is there if not community?

What they don’t tell you is how soft dirt is. Like silk. The beauty it conceals. The beauty it begot. I picked up mud and rinsed it off in the stream, looking for anything that glittered. The diamonds here aren’t always clear, but yellow and brown and sometimes black. But I didn’t find anything. The middle of December and it was 65 degrees and the sun was shining, and I, sweating, hunched, sticking my hands into holes of the earth, letting water run over them, a baptism of sorts, a burial of sorts.

Afterwards we went into town and got food at an old-fashioned store and soda pop place. When you drive into town there’s a sign commemorating the trail of tears. Outside middle school girls dressed up in sparkly dresses and heels pose for photos taken by their moms and grandmas. They were preparing for a school dance. I look at them and felt what little options they have, how there really is one path for them to follow.

We then went to sonic to get my vegan sister French fries and the woman who delivered the food to our car had a little girl trotting along beside her, six years old and pudgy - her daughter. She waved excitedly to us in the car and held her mom’s hand walking back into the sonics. I started tearing up because I know she will be miserable someday.